All 8 of the ‘Halo 5’ Campaign Characters Will Not Play the Same Way

Now that we’re just about three months away from the blockbuster release of the highly anticipated Halo 5: Guardians on Xbox One, we’re starting to learn more details about how the first purely new-gen offering in the series will play. We know that the story will focus on a renegade Master Chief, who will have a group of rival SPARTAN soldiers tasked with hunting him down, and we know that the multiplayer experience will offer some surprising new differences thanks to our early hands-on impression of the game late last year.

The campaign, which we recently discovered will be a co-op affair, will have inter-changeable player characters. In some levels, you may be playing as Master Chief or one of his “Blue Team” SPARTANs, while other levels will put you behind the visor of Commander Jameson Locke and other members of his “Fireteam Osiris.” Now we know a little bit more about the specific mechanics of the player characters, though, due to a massive new post on the Halo Waypoint blog.

In the post, 343 Industries developers revealed that each player character will have different “specialties,” which will lead to the development of different experiences. They say,

While the core gameplay and controls remain the same, each character has a unique set of starting Loadout weapons. Linda has her signature Sniper Rifle, while the Chief maintains his classic [Assault Rifle]. Naturally, all of the characters can acquire and use other weapons and vehicles along the way. There are also subtle differences between the characters in terms of attributes. For example: Kelly is the fastest member of Blue Team, while Tanaka has increased motion tracker range.

The character you control in the story, particularly when playing the campaign in co-op, will also affect the way you’re able to experience the game’s story. Each character comes with their own perspective, and that perspective can change very noticeably over the course of the narrative.

Depending on which team member you are controlling at any given time, your perspective on the story may shift as you experience slight contextual differences in dialogue. It’s a subtle thing and the core of the story always remains the same, but it’s something we hope will be appreciated by fans and add to the replay value of the co-op campaign.

To further delineate the experience, there will also be different HUD designs for different characters. Below, you can see the HUD designs for Commander Locke on the top, and SPARTAN Linda-058, one of Master Chief’s fellow SPARTAN-IIs, on the bottom.

Halo 5: Guardians will be released exclusively for Xbox One this October 27th. For more on the game as it continues to take shape ahead of release, keep your sights on GeekNation.